Hey. I'm the Andrew who runs the Churn Buster product mentioned by patio11.
Very clever of you to think to email customers before their credit card expires. :-) We had the same idea and it was a feature in the original release of our product, but after several months we actually found that only about 30% of cards set to expire actually started failing payments within two months of hitting the expiration date, and after two months failure rates just return to normal. So, even with a healthy 50% conversion rate on the email campaign, we were only retaining about 1.5 customers per 10 that we sent 3 emails to. Furthermore, the email notifications to the customers who very likely didn't need to receive the email were triggering cancelations from some customers as they re-evaluated their purchasing decision in front of a "you owe us money!" email instead of a sales page promoting the benefits they're receiving. :-) For that reason, we no longer send out these emails by default. There are still some businesses where this makes sense, but they're definitely the rare exception and not the rule.
Furthermore, we found that a very decent chunk of failed payments (maybe 15-30%?) will sort themselves out automatically with no intervention if you just try them a few times over a few days. Again, no need to email these customers and waste their time unless there is a time sensitive delivery that needs to go out or something similar.
So, for those two reasons we choose to wait until the third failed payment attempt before we start emailing the customer. But once we hit that third failed payment attempt, we really go to town trying to get in touch with the customer and get them current. We've got all sorts or tricks up our sleeves for this, including a real person with a great British accent who will call customers on the phone.
Happy to answer any questions you or anyone else may have about solving this problem. It really isn't something many subscription service providers think about when they're building their business. Feel free to reach out any time at andrew@churnbuster.io .
Great example of issues I would probably never catch if I tried to implement all of this in-house. It just wouldn't get that level of attention once it was already working.
"Oh, that's easy, I could implement all that in a weekend" - One, no. And two, no. Problems are always deeper than they seem, and it's usually the extra 90% that determines how well it works.
Very clever of you to think to email customers before their credit card expires. :-) We had the same idea and it was a feature in the original release of our product, but after several months we actually found that only about 30% of cards set to expire actually started failing payments within two months of hitting the expiration date, and after two months failure rates just return to normal. So, even with a healthy 50% conversion rate on the email campaign, we were only retaining about 1.5 customers per 10 that we sent 3 emails to. Furthermore, the email notifications to the customers who very likely didn't need to receive the email were triggering cancelations from some customers as they re-evaluated their purchasing decision in front of a "you owe us money!" email instead of a sales page promoting the benefits they're receiving. :-) For that reason, we no longer send out these emails by default. There are still some businesses where this makes sense, but they're definitely the rare exception and not the rule.
Furthermore, we found that a very decent chunk of failed payments (maybe 15-30%?) will sort themselves out automatically with no intervention if you just try them a few times over a few days. Again, no need to email these customers and waste their time unless there is a time sensitive delivery that needs to go out or something similar.
So, for those two reasons we choose to wait until the third failed payment attempt before we start emailing the customer. But once we hit that third failed payment attempt, we really go to town trying to get in touch with the customer and get them current. We've got all sorts or tricks up our sleeves for this, including a real person with a great British accent who will call customers on the phone.
Happy to answer any questions you or anyone else may have about solving this problem. It really isn't something many subscription service providers think about when they're building their business. Feel free to reach out any time at andrew@churnbuster.io .